Keep Your Enemies Closer
by medras
Summary: Olivia doesn't consider herself imprisoned...she's just biding her time. P/O, post-finale. Sequel to Friends on the Other Side.


Olivia does not wake for a long time.

In the dark, she doesn't dream often. She catches glimpses of her Other, of Peter and Walter. Sometimes she hears the others. Astrid trying to comfort Walter or Broyles blaming Nina.

One time, she smells the lab. The unique smell of burning hair, formaldehyde and salt licks for Gene fills her.

"Peter," she whispers into the blackness of the cell when she awakes,

There's no answer. She's already felt around the inside of the cell, mostly to make sure she really was trapped. There's no discernable door and all of the walls are padded. She scoffs at this, slightly offended they think she values her life so little. Olivia walks around the cell a few more times, feeling high and low along the walls. She finds the toilet next to her cot-slash-shelf and a mirror above that. She laughs. Who needs a mirror when they can't see anything?

Walternate opens the window, smirking. She rushes at him, banging on the glass just to see if it would break. She yells something that doesn't matter because she realizes it's bullet-proof glass.

When Walternate closes the shutter again, she knows where the window is, right across from her cot-slash-shelf and at eye level so long as she's standing. More importantly, though, she knows how far it is to the room behind the window. She can see its dimensions and what's inside of it (light and a small, steel table.)

Only after she knows her way out does she remember her eyes. Or eye. She takes a deep breath and bites her tongue before she allows her hand to explore her face. It feels smooth, like scar tissue, but that can't be right. Her hand continues upward as if it doesn't want to dwell on how long she might have been asleep. The flesh there is much smoother and slightly raised. She traces it and thinks it must be one large scar. When she reaches her eye, she realizes it's been sealed shut by that same scar. The socket feels flat and she wonders why it's not as sunken as she expected. Olivia is only marginally relieved that the left side of her face feels normal. She does a quick inventory of the rest of her injuries. There aren't many. Mostly minor burns on her arms and hands that she only knows are there because of the heat.

Nothing too serious, really. She's only missing an eye. And trapped in a cell in another world.

Olivia can manage. She thinks.

* * *

Peter's worse.

He wakes in a cold sweat, having had nothing but nightmares for what feels like months. He just hopes it hasn't been that long.

When Peter discovers he's been put here without Olivia, a cold dread fills his being. Immediately, the worst thoughts run through his head: Olivia dead, Olivia still in the amber, Olivia being tortured...

Olivia in another cell just like his.

It's padded white purgatory for Peter. He's been in and out of jails before. But for Olivia it must be Hell. Law enforcement doesn't do well behind bars.

Walternate opens the window for him, too. Asks him if hes willing to come back to the "right side." Peter flies at the window like his rage can keep physics at bay. The glass doesn't give way to his fists, but he beats them bloody. Just in case.

When he can't raise his arms to hit any longer he asks:

"Where is she?" voice desperate and broken,

"We have uses for her as well," is all Walternate says.

He closes the shutter leaving Peter with raw knuckles and a space he thinks of as Olivia's.

"'Livia..."

It starts as a whisper in a voice he barely recognize as his own. It transforms itself into a chant, a prayer, a hymn.

When he sleeps, he dreams of her single-mindedly.

* * *

Olivia dreams of glowing threads. Hundreds of them surrounding her, a cross between a yarn ball and a spider web. They pass over her head, under her feet, around her shoulders.

She reaches out and touches one. It feels like pure sunlight, vibrating and warm. She sees a discrete moment in a life, a boy splashing in a pool some time in early fall. Olivia can't pinpoint the year because it isn't a part of the memory. She can see everything in the memory with inhuman detail. The colors, especially. She moves her finger from the thread and the chlorine-wet skin isn't hers anymore.

Olivia traverses the maze of threads, ducking under and stepping through holes and clusters. She sees strings that touch, crossing briefly, then continuing in opposite directions. There are pairs of strings parallel to each other for their entire length and strings wound together. Olivia's shoulder brushes one such pair accidentally and she doesn't enjoy the voyeuristic moment.

Olivia walks for hours. Days, maybe. There are so many threads. She's seen so many and _knows_ there are more. Olivia feels all these threads and knows there's one she needs to see. One calling to her- half word, half thought. The strings seem to shrink around her as she concentrates on where she needs to go. Another step and she's there. Standing in front of two strings, inexplicably separated from the rest. There are a few other strings, just as bright, just as isolated as these two. The other strings only cross the pair once or twice before returning to a larger cluster of strings. Suddenly she knows who the threads belong to. She can't reach out and touch the threads, though, because it feels voyeuristic (even if it is herself.)

_And Peter._

She sees him there, their strings so close they form a knot. A glowing pinpoint stuck in her mind.

* * *

Olivia opens her eye, blinking a few times to make sure. The knot still burns in her mind like a beacon, something she should have always known was there and is now scolding her for it. She gasps as she's flooded with the realization she will never be without Peter again. She chokes on the emotion, acutely feeling the absence of the hole John had left her with.

Olivia curls up on her cot and tries not to sleep again.


End file.
